cling to through the stress of times to come.

But even while she was thus deciding upon a measure to checkmate them
both, Larry was pacing his room at Cedar Crest, at last excitedly
evolving the elusive plan which was to bring Maggie to her senses and
also to him; and Maggie, all unconscious of this new element which had
entered as a potential factor in her existence, all unconscious of how
far she had been guided from the course which had been charted for
her, was lying awake at the Grantham after a late party at which Dick
Sherwood had been her escort, and was exulting pridefully over the
seemingly near consummation of the plan that was to show Larry Brainard
how wrong he was and that was to establish her as the cleverest woman in
her line--better even than Barney or Old Jimmie believed her.

And thus separate wills each strove to direct their own lives and other
lives according to their own separate plans; little thinking to what
extent they were all entangled in a common destiny; and thinking not at
all of the further seed that was being sown for the harvest-time of the
whirlwind.

CHAPTER XXII

After Larry's many days and nights of futile searching of his brain for
a plan that would accord with his fundamental idea for awakening the
unguessed other self of Maggie, the plan, which finally came to him
complete in all its details in a single moment, was so simple and
obvious that he marveled it could have been plainly before his eyes all
this while without his ever seeing it. Of course the plan was dangerous
and of doubtful issue. It had to be so, because it involved the
reactions of strong-tempered persons as yet unacquainted who would
have no foreknowledge of the design behind their new relationship; and
because its success or failure, which might also mean his own complete
failure, the complete loss of all he had thus far gained, depended
largely upon the twist of events which he could not foresee and
therefore could not guide.

Briefly, his plan was so to manage as to have Maggie received in
the Sherwood household as a guest, to have her receive the frank,
unquestioning hospitality (and perhaps friendship) of such a gracious,
highly placed, unpretentious woman as Miss Sherwood, so distinctly a
native of, and not an immigrant to, the great world. To be received as
a friend by those against whom she plotted, to have the generous,
unsuspecting friendship of Miss Sherwood--if anything just then had a
c